AUTHOR PROFILE

Leo Aylen

Leo Aylen has had 9 poetry collections published, had about 100 poems in anthologies, and about 100 poems broadcast. The Day The Grass Came, his latest collection was described by Melvyn Bragg as “a triumph,” and by Simon Callow as “Stupendous.”

He has won prizes in the Arvon (twice), Peterloo (twice) and Bridport competitions.  
During most of the 1990’s Leo was regularly commissioned to create poems out of current
news stories for BBC Radio 4 programmes, including The Today Programme. He has created a number of poetry features for BBC Radio 3, 4, and 5. 

He co-wrote Gods and Generals, a screenplay for Ted Turner Pictures about the American Civil War, produced and directed by Ron Maxwell, executive producer Ted Turner, starring Robert Duvall, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, and Mira Sorvino (Warner Bros 2003).

He has made a number of films for BBC & ITV as a writer-director, and been nominated for a BAFTA Award.

He has performed his poetry on three continents; in the Albert Hall, St Paul’s Cathedral, in theatres, universities, schools, night clubs, hospitals, prisons, and to 4000 Zulus on an open hillside.

Anthony Burgess described his work as “Technically brilliant, exuberantly sincere, marvelously entertaining.”

Website address:
http://www.leoaylen.com
Blog: http://www.leoaylen.com/blog
Contact email: [email protected]

Go to more Leo Aylen videos
Goodbye chalk streams?         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulL9Qw-IVyk
Leo Aylen: Zululand & Jumping-Shoes         http://youtu.be/XSQpSzh_4tA
The never-ending bypass going nowhere        http://youtu.be/ubq695R8uMA
Leo Aylen: Somewhere in the Sky                 http://youtu.be/MlBwfa_GDp0
Dancing the Impossible                                  http://youtu.be/UGk6CV-tdMI
Love, sex, what a game! What battles!           http://youtu.be/tuuZ-2Sdgb0
Poems & Puns: Leo Aylen in Frome               http://youtu.be/qJ7Tq1dgvCI
Poems & Puns: Leo Aylen in Frome Trailer   http://youtu.be/NquIAtGoiFE

Biographical details continued

Leo has been Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at Mc Master University, Ontario, Poet in Residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey, and Poet in Residence at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond. He has held a Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship in the London Borough of Lambeth, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at University of Bath.

He was born in KwaZulu, South Africa, son of Charles Aylen, elected Bishop of Zululand by the Zulus, to the consternation of many whites.

A scholar of New College, Oxford, Leo took a first in Classics. He was a member of the university running squad which included one man who ran the 800 metres for New Zealand, one man who ran the 1,500 and 5,000 metres for Britain, and the world record holder for 800 metres. Leo was a member of the team which did the first ever run from Land’s End to John O’Groats. He played solo piano sonatas and chamber music in the university music rooms, and climbed several 4000 metre peaks in the Alps. He had two of his plays produced, with another one given a staged reading, and he worked in Wladek Sheybal’s acting studio.

He joined the Playwriting Group run by Bristol University Drama Department, where he had two more of his plays staged, gained a Ph.D for which he worked under H.D.F. Kitto, took acting classes at the Bristol Old Vic Drama School, and acted and directed in the university theatres, where his most notable production was one of The Clouds by Aristophanes in the original Greek with Professor Kitto as Socrates dangling in a basket.

His first appearance on British television was while running from Land’s End to John O’Groats. His second appearance was in a TV follow-up to that production of The Clouds.

While a student, he had worked on a building site. A play he wrote about the experience was broadcast on BBC TV. He worked for the BBC as a director, first, for eighteen months, in educational radio, and then in TV Documentaries and Arts, where he was nominated for a BAFTA for The Drinking Party, an adaptation of Plato’s Symposium, starring Leo McKern, Alan Bennett, and John Fortune, and directed by Jonathan Miller. Many years later, a writer described The Drinking Partyas one of the finest programmes in its genre of the half-century.

Leo made a number of films about artists in various disciplines, and some notable films which were partly documentary and partly dramatized: 1065 and all that, about life in Anglo-Saxon England; Dynamo, a life of Michael Faraday, starring Ian Richardson as Faraday, Who’ll Buy a Bubble? about life in the tower blocks of London’s East End, Celluloid Love, about a model’s love affair with the camera.

He also created a 6-programme series, Six Bites of the Cherry, human life in six stages, presented in poems, songs, and a specially created dance series to poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, which Leo translated specially for the series, choreographed and lead-danced by Malcolm Clare.

He has worked in the theatre, mainly the Greenwich, where he wrote lyrics for the musical Down the Arches, and a pantomime, and directed his own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. He started touring the United States performing his theatrical poetry shows and lecturing. He lived for eighteen months in New York while he was Poet in Residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and has lived in New York and Los Angeles from time to time. Leo and his poetry have been made the sole subjects of three commercial TV programs (CBS).

He has appeared on about a hundred campuses in the United States and Canada, as the guest of Classics, English, Drama and Theatre, Film and Communication, Departments. He is that rarity, a scholar who is also a performer and director in both film and theatre.

He has been the Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at Mc Master University, Ontario, his chair held in the Department of Classics. But while holding the Professorship and giving both public lectures and specialised seminars and workshops on classical Greek drama to the Classics department, he was also invited to perform his one-man play Red Alert: this is a god warning in the theatre to public audiences; to give a reading of his poetry to the English department; and a seminar on French chanson, especially the work of Jacques Brel, to the French department.

He was Poet in Residence at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey. When his year’s residency was up, he was invited to stay for a second year.

In other universities, he has been invited to show his films to the Film department, to give workshops to acting students in theatre or drama departments, and lectures, readings, and workshops, to English, Classics, Comparative Literature, and Humanities, departments.
He has been invited for many special events. He has also lectured to women’s lunch clubs, and given poetry performances in high schools.

Back in London, he was awarded a Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship. This was partly a writer’s prize, but also required him to spend time as a Poet in Residence to the London Borough of Lambeth, where he appeared as poet during the Lambeth Country Show, on a bandstand during the judging of a beauty competition, in youth clubs, at pensioners’ lunches, in hospitals, and prisons, as well as in the local theatre. He was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to write a Saturday Feature about the experience.

From 1994 to 2002, he ran Piccadilly Poets which presented half a dozen shows each season, first in the Jermyn Street Theatre, and then at the Actors’ Centre. Each show had three parts: a first half of open-mic in a competition for the prize of a solo reading; the second half presented a guest poet, and then an anthology programme performed by named actors, alternately devised and directed either by Leo or by his colleague and wife Pauline Lisowska. This ran for eight years, supported only by a small Lottery grant. At the same time, Leo gave eight workshops a year at the Actors’ Centre on poetry performance for actors.

In 2001-2002, he was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, and was Writer in Residence at The Byam Shaw School of Art, and then at University of Bath.

He has also held a Poet in Residence position in the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond.

He has explored the Pacific North-West (British Columbia and the Alaskan panhandle) while working with Native Americans on his screenplay Raven Warrior based on a legend of that culture.

At the other end of the world, he was chosen to write Soul of a Nation, the major BBC two-part documentary on the King of Thailand – the first time the King has appeared on  television. Shown on BBC 2, the narration spoken by John Gielgud, it caused excited reactions. Bernard Levin wrote a centre-page feature on it in The Times, and questions were asked about it in Parliament. It is now possible to see 11 pirated versions of it on YouTube. 

Although brought up in England, Leo kept in touch with Zulu friends, including Prince Buthelezi with whom he has corresponded for forty years. He spent time in KwaZulu during the late 1970’s on a travel fellowship, and then made a performing tour of theatres, campuses, and Black art centres; he performed at the Space in Cape Town, and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. In the late 1980’s, apartheid was collapsing. Leo was there during a violent civil war between the ANC and the Zulus, in which 25,000 civilians, mostly Zulu, were killed. Leo was detained by South African Army Intelligence for possessing books by banned black writers, participated in various Zulu and Swazi conferences, and gave poetry performances, including one to a gathering of four thousand Zulus in an open-air amphitheatre, as a prelude to a display of Zulu dancing. He returned for the liberation in 1994, and created a radio feature of poetry and documentary actuality called Zulu Dreamtime for BBC Radio 4. He was in KwaZulu for the elections of 2004, being one of only four white people at a rally of the Zulu political party, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and he was there again in 2014. He supports a charity — Helwel — which raises money for community development in KwaZulu, so he toured an area of rural deprivation where he was told 90% of the people had AIDS. Then, as guest of the IFP, he attended sessions of the South African Parliament in Cape Town.

Having been awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship in the University of Bath, he moved back to the West Country where he had lived both as a child, and in between university and moving to London. While at Bath he was commissioned to make Chaos & Pattern (2007),  a six-film series on cutting-edge scientific and engineering experiments: one points the way to a cure for diabetes, another has made optical fibre obsolete, opened a new science of medical physics, and contributed to a Nobel prize; etc.  

In 2011 Oxford University inaugurated a world-wide virtual exhibition of Anglo-Saxon art and culture, called Woruldhord, with Leo’s BBC film, 1065 and all that, part of the exhibition.

Leo continues to write and perform poetry. As well as Zulu Dreamtime, he has created a number of features for BBC Radios 3, 4, and 5, writing poetry specially for them: Le Far West (Radio 3), for which he translated songs of Jacques Brel, and performed them as plays with the actors Alfred Molina and Caroline John; Dancing Bach (Radio 3), a poet’s journey through Bach, in which a choreographer improvised choreography to organ chorale preludes, and, while most of the music came from disc, Leo played one of the preludes — O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross — on a specially built Bach organ.

Leo has translated poetry from Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, mostly for the BBC, but Greek also for CBS in the United States. Most of these translations are from classical Greek. His translation of The Birds by Aristophanes, in two different versions, has had three productions on Radio 4 and 3. He has translated from both the Iliad and the Odyssey, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sappho, Theocritus, and the Greek Anthology, mostly for Radio 3.

His translations of classical Greek poetry led to him having some of his translations published in Greek Poetry: New Voices and Ancient Echoes (Agenda). This led to a series of performances in London and Oxford with Fiona Shaw, and then to some concerts, one of which, in a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall, had him working with Thanos Mikroustikos, known as the Theodorakis of today. 

During most of the 1990’s Leo was regularly commissioned to create poems out of current news stories for BBC Radio 4 programmes, including The Today Programme.

He has received prizes in the Arvon (twice), Peterloo (twice) and Bridport competitions.  

He has had poetry published in Germany, Sweden, and Holland, and has been translated into Polish and Catalan. Somewhere in the Sky one of his poems, originally published in Rhymoceros, his collection of poetry for children, has been published since in six anthologies, title poem in one of them, has been recorded by a German company, and featured in a Hong Kong Festival of speech.

Having done some rock-climbing, and having had one summer on snow and ice in the high Alps, pressure of his professional life demoted him from climber to fell-walker. He loves mountains, and takes as many opportunities as possible to get away to them.

One reviewer of a performance described Leo as “a mixture of  Hilaire Belloc, Ogden Nash, Euripides, and David Attenborough, his poetry crackled and sparkled; he keeps the wonder of the natural world alive” Since childhood, he has been passionately fond of animals and the natural world, and wrote about the environment long before it was fashionable to do so. One of his Arvon poetry prizes was won for a long poem called The Day the Grass Came, (published in The Ring of Words, Arvon prizewinning anthology 1998), a vision of an ecological Armageddon. First performed in the Royal Festival Hall’s Purcell Room, its second performance was sponsored by the Biology Department of Principia College, Illinois, the Christian Science university of the United States. The Biology Professor was attempting to recreate – in an area of a few square metres – the original prairie grass and its special ecology, since the prairie has totally disappeared from Illinois.

Leo currently lives on the banks of a Wessex chalk stream, one of the most sensitive ecological sites in Europe. A developer, however, has won permission to devastate this SSSI, SAC, AONB, river bank by building 35 suburban houses on it, thus killing all the endangered species. In 2014, Leo wrote a poem of protest which is now a YouTube film, called Goodbye Chalk Streams?, introduced by Prunella Scales. When the collection, The Day The Grass Came, was published in 2012, Prunella wrote very enthusiastically about it to Leo. Somehow this led to Leo creating a show of his poetry called An Assortment of Sibyls for him and Prunella to perform. This was done successfully in festivals and theatres. When Prunella became unwell, Sara Kestelman took over from her, and this led to a sequel called The Trouble with Women is Men, which premièred at the Frome Festival in 2015. 

He has been profiled in a number of journals and magazines — Bath Chronicle, Cotswold Essence, UK Writer, and a BBC Bristol’s West Country Lives was devoted to him. He has himself written feature articles occasionally for newspapers — The Guardian, The Church Times. The latter was the only section of the media that dared to publish Leo’s account of the ANC butchering Zulus in the civil war of the 1980’s and 1990’s. With his love of the Greek poet-playwrights Leo firmly believes poetry should be political in the widest sense, offering a vision of society wrong and right. 
  
For Leo, poetry is nearer to song and theatre than it is to prose literature. All his poems are written to be spoken (or sung). For his solo shows, he always performs without the book, believing that performing by heart in front of an audience sharpens the poem. He has written one-man plays — Whatever Happened to the King of Spain’s Daughter, with music by Courtney Kenny, performed in St John’s Smith Square, the Orange Tree Richmond, and in Bath; and Red Alert: this is a god warning, performed in the Soho Poly, the Tricycle, the Orange Tree, Edinburgh Festival, Darlington Festival, and in North America, and he has also  assembled many theatrical shows out of his poetry, one being called Why I’m Not A Policeman, performed in various venues in the West Country.

Bibliography:
The Day The Grass Came (Muswell Press 2012)
Dark Matter – contributor (Calouste-Gulbenkian 2008)
Scary Poems to Make You Shiver – contributor (OUP 2006)
How to Embarrass Grown-Ups – contributor (Macmillan 2004)
For William Cookson – contributor (Agenda Editions 2003)
One River Many Creeks – contributor  (Macmillan 2003)
101 Favourite Poems Century – contributor (Collins 2002)
The Bridport Prize Anthology – contributor (Sansom & Company 2002)
A Tribute to Ronald Duncan - contributor (Agenda Editions 2001)
The Works – contributor (Macmillan 2000)
The Moonlit Stream – contributor (OUP 2000)
Goodnight, Sleep Tight – contributor (Scholastic 2000)
Greek Poetry: New voices and ancient echoes - contributor (Agenda Editions 1999)
A Glass of New Made Wine – contributor (Salzburg 1999)
Unzip Your Lips Again– contributor (Macmillan 1999)
Anthology - contributor (Agenda Editions 1999)
Unzip Your Lips – contributor (Macmillan 1998)
The Ring of Words (Arvon Prizewinners’ Anthology) – contributor (Daily Telegraph 1998)
Dancing The Impossible: New & Selected Poems (Salzburg 1997)
Century 100 Major Modern Poets – contributor (Orbis 1996)
Somewhere in the Sky (Nelson 1996)
Does W Trouble You? – contributor (Viking 1994)
Criminal Records – contributor (Viking 1994)
Arvon Prizewinners’ Anthology – contributor (Arvon Foundation 1993)
The Blue Nose Poetry Anthology – contributor (Blue Nose Press 1993)
One in a Million – contributor (Viking 1992)
100 Favourite Animal Poems – contributor (Piatkus 1992)
The Methuen Book of Theatre Verse – contributor (Methuen 1991)
Songmakers – contributor (Maskew Miller Longman 1990)
Never Say Boo To a Ghost – contributor (OUP 1990)
Nothing Tastes Quite Like A Gerbil – contributor (Macmillan 1989)
Rhymoceros (Macmillan 1989)
Toughie Toffee – contributor (Lions 1989)
Spaceways – contributor (OUP 1986)
The Greek Theater (Associated University Presses 1985)
Standpoints – contributor (Harrap 1983)
Jumping-Shoes (Sidgwick & Jackson 1983)
The Sun Dancing – contributor (Kestrel 1982)
Red Alert: this is a god warning (Sidgwick & Jackson 1981)
Return to Zululand (Sidgwick & Jackson 1980, 6th imprint 1988)
Sunflower (Sidgwick & Jackson 1976, 4th imprint 1985)
Laugh or Cry or Yawn – contributor (Cheshire 1980)
Greece for Everyone (Sidgwick & Jackson 1976)
I, Odysseus (Sidgwick & Jackson 1971)
Folk and Vision – contributor (Granada 1971)
Open the Door – contributor (Thieme, Zutphen, Netherlands1970)
Open the Door – contributor (Gleerups, Sweden 1970
Discontinued Design (Venture Press 1969)
Tunes on a Tin Whistle – contributor (Pergamon Press 1967)
Classical Drama and its Influence (Methuen 1965)
Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Methuen 1964)

Pitch to Publishers & Festival Organisers:
Anthony Burgess described Leo’s work as “Technically brilliant, exuberantly sincere, marvelously entertaining.” After reading The Day The Grass Came Simon Callow wrote “I’ve just finished reading The Day The Grass Came. I am overwhelmed, thrilled, lit up. Virile, vital, virtuosic. Stupendous. The words demand to be spoken out loud, insist on it; and the underlying connections forging the whole piece into one great organic entity are profound and muscular. The earth moves.” Melvyn Bragg called the book “a triumph.” At one festival Leo was described as “a mixture of  Hilaire Belloc, Ogden Nash, Euripides, and David Attenborough, his poetry crackled and sparkled; he keeps the wonder of the natural world alive.” Leo is a profoundly serious poet with passionate beliefs about many aspects of life today, but he is also very funny, and makes his audiences laugh.  

Awards & Prizes:
Distinguished Visiting Professor, McMaster University, Ontario 1986
Poet in Residence, Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey 1972 - 74
Poet in Residence, Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond 1999 - 2000
Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship    1979 – 1980
Royal Literary Fund Fellowship 2001 - 2003

Poetry Prizes:
Arvon 1992     ‘Gemma’s first night with Lucy’
Peterloo 1999  ‘Bloody Refugees’
Peterloo 2003 ’Letter to William’
Bridport 2002  ‘Belfast Incident’
Arvon 1998     ‘The Day the Grass Came’

Literary Festival Appearances:
London, Birmingham, Cheltenham, Bristol, Darlington, Frome (2ce) Warminster (2 ce), Ledbury, Richmond,
Please Attach Author Images and Book Cover Graphics:
Links to Book Covers in http://www.leoaylen.com/books

http://www.leoaylen.com/books/the-day-the-grass-came/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/dancing-the-impossible-new-selected-poems/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/jumping-shoes/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/red-alert-this-is-a-god-warning/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/return-to-zululand/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/sunflower/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/i-odysseus/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/discontinued-design/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/rhymoceros/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/the-greek-theater/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/greece-for-everyone/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/classical-drama-and-its-influence/
http://www.leoaylen.com/books/greek-tragedy-and-the-modern-world/

Author images to be sent separately as email attachments